Zach Braff has released the poster for his second directorial effort Wish I Was Here, which like Garden State is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Braff stars in the film alongside Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin, Ashley Greene, Donald Faison, Jim Parsons and others. The movie is set to premiere this weekend. The LA /Film crew arrived in Park City last night and will be covering this and many other films over the next week. Hit the jump to see the full poster.

In an entirely appropriate twist, Woody Allen‘s Bullets Over Broadway is now itself headed to Broadway. At the helm of the new show is Susan Stroman, who just so happens to have previous experience directing Broadway plays about Broadway plays — she previously directed and choreographed The Producers and picked up a couple of Tonys for her trouble.

Leading the musical production as naive playwright David Shayne is Zach Braff, of Scrubs and Garden State fame. How does he measure up to John Cusack, who played the role in Allen’s 1994 movie? See for yourself with a first-look image after the jump.

The omnibus film Tar is based on the life and work of poet C.K. Williams, but the real attraction of the film is the cast. Jessica Chastain, James Franco, Mila Kunis, Zach Braff, and Bruce Campbell are among the actors who worked with twelve new directors from NYU to create a film that acts as both biopic for Williams and an exploration of his work.

Hating on Zach Braff has become the cool thing to do. The reason being the actor/director took to Kickstarter in April to fund his next movie, Wish I Was Here. It was a polarizing move because many people felt Braff had enough clout to get traditional funding. He agreed, but decided he’d rather make the movie outside the system. Support and money poured in, as did criticism of the plan. Braff has remained steadfast in his decision, and is lining up a fantastic cast for the film. So far he’s got Anna Kendrick, Kate Hudson, Mandy Patinkin, Jim Parsons and Josh Gad.

Braff stopped by Sirius XM earlier this week and not only did a little defending, he revealed he off-handedly explained the entire crowd funding avenue to Woody Allen. Allen, whose last few films have all been set in Europe because it’s easier for him to get funding there, was apparently quite taken by the idea. Braff also revealed that Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell approached him to write a song for the film. Read more, and listen, to the segments below. Read More »

Update:Variety has a new report on this financing deal which changes the equation. In short, it says the funds from Worldview are gap financing, which is not at all what was reported earlier. To sum up, the production is doing foreign rights sales in Cannes, which we knew, and which Braff had disclosed weeks ago. Traditional loans against those sales may not come in fast enough to get the production going on schedule. So Worldview is, in essence, loaning that money to the production now so that it can move forward.

Producer Stacy Sher says “Worldview may end up providing nothing at the end of the day beyond the gap loan depending on how we do in Cannes.”

If Variety is accurate, then any assumptions made about “full financing” from Worldview could be quite wrong, as would be conclusions (such as mine) drawn from previous reports. (Zach Braff later updated his Kickstarter page with the same information, so there’s no reason to believe it is wrong.) Our original article follows; it was sourced from THR’s original report about the financing, which has been scrubbed to remove inaccurate information with no mention of that fact.

Creators of brilliant-but-cancelled TV series aren’t the only ones who’ve been inspired by Veronica Mars‘ Kickstarter success. Zach Braff has taken note, and now he’s taking a similar route to fund his next movie.

Braff made quite a splash with his 2004 feature directing debut Garden State, but as he explains it, the difficulty of finding financing has kept him from making a follow-up. Until now, that is, with your help. Wish I Was Here is designed as “not a sequel in story, but a continuation of the tone” of Garden State, centering on a 30something struggling actor instead of a 20something one. Watch his pitch video, which features appearances from Donald Faison, Jim Parsons, and Chris Hardwick, after the jump.

Sam Raimi was faced with a predicament. Two of the characters in his upcoming film Oz The Great and Powerful are completely fantastical (a flying talking monkey and a foot tall talking/walking breakable china ceramic doll) but he didn’t want to have the characters to be completely created and performed in post production, and he also didn’t want to use performance capture as it sometimes results in very robotic-looking performances.

Trust me, you will be amazed at the computer generated performances in this film. How did Raimi and team pull it off? Find out after the jump.

In October 2011, I got to visit the wonderful world of Oz and watch director Sam Raimi direct his preboot (prequel/reboot) of the classic L. Frank Baum book series. I learned much on the set of Oz: The Great and Powerful. Most fascinating to me was some of the things Disney had to do satisfy legal concerns over possibly violating copyrighted imagery from the classic 1939 film adaptation, owned by Warner Bros.

And while trailers for the film focus on wholly computer-generated worlds and characters, you might be shocked to learn the lengths that Sam Raimi went through to shoot a lot of the film practically. For example, it was interesting to see Raimi inventing new practical solutions to help the supporting actors create and react to live performances for characters who would eventually be created in CG — and I’m not talking about performance capture.

After the jump you can watch a video blog we recorded talking about the visit, followed by many more things I learned while on the set.